New pirate eBay goods: demo DVD

[Lando]

Tahoe wrote:
Maybe I'm missing something here but, what exactly makes this illegal/pirated? The first auction (PD collection) seems to have PD only games, and he mentions there are NO rom images included for the emulators.

The Demo DVD, well, Demo's are PD, and have always been PD. He obviously took a lot of time making this, looking at the DVD menu there was quite a bit of work making these.

I agree completely.  Although I can count the number of my own scene releases on the fingers of one hand I honestly wouldn't care if they appeared on a DVD (not that anyone would want to... ;-)).

Anyway, it beats all the '17-bit' / 'Scene Archive' / 'Scene Storm' / 'Demomania' / 'Demo Collection' / 'Demos are Forever' et al CD compilations that nobody seemed to have a problem with.

[Lando]

AntonioX wrote:

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/megadrive-150-games-snes-amiga-mega-cd-NES_W0QQitemZ8274399357QQcategoryZ3653QQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem

That one is a big collection of used carts and consoles.  I can't see anything pirated there?

[Lando]

_ThEcRoW wrote:
Sad, very sad. By the way, have the demos any type of licence like gpl or such nowadays?, because i think that those demos were published for free, so it's perfectly legal distributing it. As someone said in a post in this thread, remember the pd libraries and their postage fees? that's a similar situation.

Exactly.  It's identical.  PD libraries such as 17-bit and the hundreds of others used to sell disks at £1.50 - £2.25 each (actual cost of blank disks were about 15p each and postage was 17p 1st class, plus the cost of the jiffy).  That's about a 500% profit per disk.  17-bit made enough from "selling other people's hard work" (as one person here put it) to start up Team 17.

I wonder if the people complaining in this thread now were spending all their time 15 years ago scribbling letters to Amiga Format / Amiga Power et al complaining about their adverts and calling all the PD sellers pirates?

[Lando]

weirdami wrote:

ll the demos are freely (and legally) downloadable

Freely available does not mean free to profit from and does not mean public domain.

No, it's the fact that the demos were released into the public domain by the authors, distributed by Public Domain libraries on disks with "Public Domain software" printed on them in big black letters, reviewed in the "Public Domain" sections of Amiga magazines, distributed as public domain for over a decade, included on numerous Public Domain CD compilations, distributed as Public Domain on the internet, on BBS's, and by mail swappers that made them public domain.

If they weren't public domain the authors should have done something about it then and sued Future publishing, ACP & TCP, 17-bit, Almathera, PDSoft, Amiga BBS's, and all the rest.  Not have a few people who know nothing about it abritrarily decide on their behalf 15 years after the fact that they weren't public domain after all.

[Lando]

Incidentally, acp & tcp are still selling the 'Scene Archives' CD collections (approx 1000 scene demos / intros per CD) at 10 Euro each, and Vesalia is selling the Amiga CD Sensation - Demos are Forever compilation for 3 Euro.

So, if those of you who say you are against this on principle, and aren't just applying your rule selectively, you can drop them a line (contact email addresses on their respective websites) and let them know what dirty pirates they are.

And, of course, the links to their sites can be deleted from Amiga.org (just as the link to the DVD the guy was selling originally was).